Tag Archives: Child Abuse

Videos

Should we kill children who impose obligations on us?

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This woman thinks that we should. (H/T ECM)

Lori Ziganto writes:

According to author and columnist Virginia Ironside, most adopted kids would be better off dead. As would most children she considers “unfit”. In fact, she says, a “loving” mother would smother a sickly child with a pillow, because the “suffering” of being ill makes that life meaningless and not worth living. She made these vile assertions in defense of abortion while appearing on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live during a discussion grossly entitled “Can abortion be a kindness?” First, her odious attempt to argue that abortion is a “loving choice” because some kids, in her mind, are unwanted. Her tunnel-visioned, sad excuse for a mind can’t seem to fathom the fact that the children are always wanted, by someone. You know, like people with hearts and compassion.

[…]To pro-abortionists, an illness is a reason to kill a baby. In fact, they believe that life is expendable for any reason if it doesn’t fit into your personal plans. This includes life that is outside of the woman’s body. Ms. Ironside, like most pro-abortionists, also fails to mention those pesky babies who won’t cooperate and who survive abortion attempts. Much like our President, who gives them so little thought that he, as a Senator in Illinois debating a Born Alive bill, said this:

As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead..

However you want to describe “it”. Sort of like the suffering “things” Ms. Ironside referred to above. And, not coming out limp and dead. How dare they insist on having the human will to live and the strong spirit to survive.

This is what that fabulous, adorable Jennifer Roback Morse is always saying about feminism. The feminist idea is that relationships are never engaged in order to serve others, but only to make the strong women happy and fulfilled. Women in relationships should never have to fulfill obligations to other people, feminists tell us. Everything should be about selfishness, amusement, and personal fulfillment – including using men and children for those ends – or even killing them if they become too demanding.  (Men and children are “needy” and “pouty” – they have no right to have expectations about what women should do). The feminists have forgotten that there is a purpose for the suffering that is part of self-sacrificial love.

By the way, I spent most of last night listening to Jennifer Roback Morse lectures from her conference. If you listen to the first Bill Duncan speech, (or maybe the second), he talks about this refusal to take on the natural obligations to others in a relationship context. Look, relationships can’t last if the person is unwilling to honor their commitments. If you make a vow to take on those obligations to love someone (and children) self-sacrificially then you have to do it. Whatever happened to compassion and nurturing?

And like my virginity post showed, the ability to fulfill those obligations depends on a host of other decisions that you’ll have made before you ever get married – decisions about chastity, but also decisions about volunteering, education, earning and saving. The habits you set when dealing with people of the opposite sex before you marry affects how well you can potentially treat a spouse. If you use other people like objects, you don’t suddenly magically develop the capacity to love them self-sacrificially with magic vows. You can only love as well as the decisions you make. Unselfishness has to be a practiced habit in order for the marriage to last.

UPDATE: Alisha has more here.

Commentary

Do big government tax credits break up intact families?

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Here’s a research study from the Royal Economic Society. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Labour’s tax credits have caused thousands of families to break up, an authoritative study said yesterday.

The flagship scheme is blamed for a doubling of the divorce rate among low income parents with young children.

Tax credits, introduced a decade ago to cut child poverty, were supposed to help single mothers and hard-working families.

But a so-called ‘couple penalty’ means that a mother can pick up more than £100 extra a week by splitting from her partner.

Evidence published by the Royal Economic Society said that tax credits give mothers married to men on low earnings an incentive to divorce.

The study found that the divorce rate among mothers with low-income husbands rose by 160 per cent in the three years after the benefits were brought in.

Marco Francesconi, of the University of Essex, said that tax credits had limited the
benefits of marriage, encouraged mothers to work and produced a ‘greater risk of family disruption’.

He said: ‘The result that tax credits had strong employment and divorce effects on married mothers in poor households is very important.

The findings, published in the highly-influential Economic Journal, are the first hard evidence that tax credits are working to drive couples apart.

[…]Professor Francesconi and two senior colleagues based their research on 3,235 couples tracked from 1991 by the British Household Panel Survey.

‘Women married to a partner who did not work or who worked fewer than 16 hours a week were more than 2 per cent more likely to dissolve their partnership after the reform than their childless counterparts,’ the report said.

Now take a look at this interview about unilateral (“no fault”) divorce from Life Site News, featuring Dr. Stephen Baskerville. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

LSN: Are there any other often-ignored laws or cultural issues that work against the family?

SB: The divorce regime is in fact a panoply of destructive laws, not just no-fault.  The massive federally funded machinery catering to the dishonest hysteria over “domestic violence” is almost all geared to facilitating divorce.  Knowingly false accusations of domestic violence are now out of control, and almost all of it is generated to secure custody of children in divorce cases.

The same is largely true of the hysteria over “child abuse”.  Child abuse is certainly real, but almost all of it takes place in single-parent homes, not intact families.  In other words, there is a child abuse industry that actually creates the problem it professes to be addressing.  By encouraging false accusations of child abuse to facilitate divorce and single-parent homes, the child abuse industry actually creates more child abuse.  That is a shocking statement, I realize, but I have documented it in my book.

Child support is another facilitator of divorce.  Too many people credulously accept feminist/government propaganda that child support is to provide for children who have been abandoned.  Nothing is further from the truth.  It is mostly extorted from fathers that have been evicted, again through “no fault” of their own.  It is a subsidy on divorce and single-parent homes.  If you pay people to divorce, they will do it more.  That is precisely what child support does.

Basically, these single-mother welfare policies are put in place by left-wing political parties in order to provide financial incentives to women to break up their marriages. This is called “compassion” – equalizing the life outcomes of married couples with single-mother households. Government does this by transferring wealth from marriage couples to single parents households.

But social problems are created by fatherless homes, no matter how much wealth redistribution the socialists do. Big government has to raise taxes and increase social programs to deal with the failures they themselves caused in the first place. Bigger government means more regulation of private life, and less take-home pay for working husbands. Eventually, a traditionally-minded man cannot support a family alone, and his wife has to work. That leaves government-regulated day cares and public schools in charge of the children. How convenient for the secular left – now they can impose their sex education on ever younger children. Parents can’t complain about what they don’t know about.

Remember that 77% of young, unmarried women voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. This is what they wanted – to replace the unreliable men they freely and unwisely chose for themselves with the security offered by big government. But big government gets its money from the reliable men. What do you suppose the reliable men will do when 50% of their paycheck is confiscated by the state? Does that give a man confidence to get married? Will he respected by his family and have moral authority in the home because of his role as sole provider? Of course not. Government will be in charge.

News

Calgary dad mourns daughter murdered by her stepfather

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Story from the Calgary Sun.

Excerpt:

He barely knew his daughter Clare, having seen her only five times since the divorce.

James Shelswell said he was looking forward to Clare growing older, and the far-off day when he might finally bond with the child he surrendered when she was only four months old.

Instead, Shelswell will fly this week from Calgary to Abbotsford B.C., to attend Clare’s funeral.

On Sunday, Clare was murdered, her throat slashed open after an apparent domestic dispute between her mom and step-dad over how to discipline the kids.

Peter Wilson, 29, is charged with killing his step daughter.

And now, all that’s left for her biological dad is to say goodbye to the stranger who was once his baby girl.

“She didn’t really know me — I’d seen her maybe five time in five years,” said Shelswell.

If his daughter dying in pain and terror at the hands of the man she knew as her dad wasn’t devastating enough, Shelswell has been told [by his ex-wife] he’s not welcome at the funeral.

[…]“I asked if she was in the room when it happened and why she didn’t protect Clare — she said it happened in a different room, and I asked if my other daughter saw it. She said no.”

His ex, said Shelswell, then made it clear he is not welcome at Clare’s private funeral service.

“She said I shouldn’t go to the funeral, and I have no rights to my kids,” said Shelswell.

[…]In Calgary, Shelswell, who is re-married with two kids, is a man whose fury is mixed with remorse.He laments that he didn’t have enough money to fight back with a lawyer, back when his wife took their Calgary-born daughters away to B.C.

He says he settled into a pattern of paying child support, and looking forward to yearly visit with his girls — the last, a happy trip to Vancouver, included the aquarium and McDonald’s.

This is my worst nightmare, but it illustrates the general truth that biological dads are the least likely person to harm their own children, which I blogged about before. This paper from the Heritage Foundation cites a very interesting study that shows more about which who is really dangerous to children. Here’s another paper that explains why marriages are the safest arrangements for women and children. The very institution that is under attack by third-wave feminists who abhor the “unequal” gender roles that emerge in marriage.

Here’s a government report:

Mothers are almost twice as likely to be directly involved in child maltreatment as fathers.

[…]Generally speaking, the same characteristics that make a man a good father make him less likely to abuse or neglect his children. Fathers who nurture and take significant responsibility for basic childcare for their children (e.g., feeding, changing diapers) from an early age are significantly less likely to sexually abuse their children.35 These fathers typically develop such a strong connection with their children that it decreases the likelihood of any maltreatment.

The involvement of a father in the life of a family is also associated with lower levels of child neglect, even in families that may be facing other factors, such as unemployment and poverty, which could place the family at risk for maltreatment.36 Such involvement reduces the parenting and housework load a mother has to bear and increases the overall parental investments in family life, thereby minimizing the chances that either parent will neglect to care for or to supervise their children.

On average, fathers who live in a married household with their children are better able to create a family environment that is more conducive to the safety and necessary care of their children. Consequently, children who live with their biological father in a married household are significantly less likely to be physically abused, sexually abused, or neglected than children who do not live with their married biological parents.

When feminists make fathers out to be monsters, and lobby for extremely liberal divorce laws enforced by extremely anti-male divorce courts, the result is that more children are assaulted, sexually-abused and even murdered at the hands of live-in boyfriends and stepfathers.

Sorry to all of my male readers who are honorable stepfathers, but the fact is that stepfathers on average are not as safe for children as biological fathers. And that’s why we should not be encouraging the break-up of marriages with no-fault divorce laws and anti-male divorce courts. Women also need to be more careful about who they choose to have children with!

By the way, if you guys are looking for a great movie to watch that is extremely pro-fatherhood, watch “Taken” with Liam Neeson. Be warned, it is very mature subject matter. Definitely, definitely for grown-ups only. If you are a man, you will ADORE this movie. Oh, and it’s not PC, so don’t watch it if you are all multicultural and moral relativistic.